


The Proctor House

by eyra



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 19th Century, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Angst, Friends to Lovers, Growing Up Together, Historical, Illnesses, M/M, Marauders, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), New England, Oral Sex, Period Typical Attitudes, Religion, Religious Guilt, Romance, Sick Remus Lupin, Slash, Writer Remus Lupin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:15:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26220247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyra/pseuds/eyra
Summary: The Proctor House was a wide-fronted timber saltbox: the oldest one in the village, Remus always said, although that never made much sense to Sirius because such a house would have needed four, maybe five men to build it, and the village was too far from the towns for the builders to have come here and left again at the end of each day, so it stood to reason that other houses must have existed first, if only to provide the builders with shelter whilst they worked on the Proctor House. Regardless, Remus thought it was the oldest, and Sirius had always known Remus was much cleverer than he, so it must have been the oldest.Sirius and Remus in a village, in the past, picking apples and falling in love and falling apart, together.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 36
Kudos: 70





	1. Lizzie Proctor

**Author's Note:**

> I swear to you that Freedom & Whisky part three is still happening, I just have a million and one things going on right now and haven't had the time to give it the attention I so desperately want to give it - but things will be quieter in a couple of months' time and I promise that's when I'll get back to it! 
> 
> Until then, here's a sad little thing about secrets and the woods and apple-picking. Interpret this story however you wish.

The Proctor House was a wide-fronted timber saltbox: the oldest one in the village, Remus always said, although that never made much sense to Sirius because such a house would have needed four, maybe five men to build it, and the village was too far from the towns for the builders to have come here and left again at the end of each day, so it stood to reason that other houses must have existed first, if only to provide the builders with shelter whilst they worked on the Proctor House. Regardless, Remus thought it was the oldest, and Sirius had always known Remus was much cleverer than he, so it must have been the oldest. It had nine rectangular windows at the front, and four at the back, and a brick chimney stack jutting up at the apex of the slate roof like a beacon. The clapboard was a dark oak, fashioned in horizontal panels and hammered together with great iron nails, and there was a crumbling stone wall that circled the perimeter of the plot that was so low it was barely visible in the sea of sepia leaves that fell from the towering beech trees in the autumn, and disappeared altogether every winter when the snow drifts covered it over and blocked the path from the edge of the village to the edge of the woods.

Thomas Proctor had leased the house as new the day after Washington crossed the Delaware, they said, and lived there for little more than a year. His wife, Lizzie, succumbed to consumption in the depths of the following winter and sent a broken Thomas back south, taking seven children and leaving behind a darkness that Sirius thought hung heavy around the house even half a century later, like a bloodstain in lumber. An English family came and went, followed by a visiting pastor, and a young bookbinder who was himself taken by a harsh December, then a once-wealthy prospector from the south seeking redemption and a quiet place to live out the rest of his days and, finally, Professor Lupin and his young son.

The Black family took over a house at the other end of the village during the old prospector’s tenancy, and Sirius always remembered hiding in the copse across the dirt road and watching the towering form of Lyall Lupin heaving sacks and luggage from the back of a cart and a young Remus trotting up after him into the shadow of the house. A ruin, his mother would often say; a house no grander than their own for its size, and no doubt derelict within, and a cheap price that the professor could afford but barely, she'd say with a sneer, scowling at the patches on the elbows of Lyall's jackets. The inside wasn't derelict, Sirius came to learn, when he stole away through an open window for the first time in their eleventh year and spent the day playing pirates in Remus's bedroom, but it had fewer comforts than the Black house. The walls flaked a little under the touch, the floorboards swollen and ill-fitting, and every joist creaked and groaned at the onset of rain. And always that darkness; something from decades ago, left behind by the house's namesake, damp and cloying and forever pulling at the edges of Sirius's mind whenever he visited, as if the house knew he wasn't supposed to be there. 

Remus, for his part, never seemed to feel it.

***

Sirius truthfully never could remember their first meeting. He did remember watching the Lupins take over the house, and he did remember his mother discussing the professor over supper on many nights, but he could not, if asked, recall the first day he spoke to the Lupin boy. Perhaps it had been in the schoolroom, after one of their classes. Perhaps Sirius had crept over the low stone wall around the house and peered into a window, and perhaps Remus had caught him looking and come outside to scold him. He could remember a time before Remus, and then he could remember the two of them in the woods, already thick as thieves, but he never would be able to find the fulcrum between the before and the after. It was as if one day they both awoke and suddenly knew almost everything about the other; the way they laughed, or how fast Sirius could run, or the way Remus knew which berries along the lane were the sweetest and which would give them terrible stomachaches. Remus knew that Sirius was quick and clever, and that his brother Regulus was timid, and that Orion and Walburga Black were nothing like either of their sons. Sirius knew that Remus was devastating and brilliant, and that Lyall was formidable and fierce. Remus never spoke of his own mother, though. Perhaps she left them in childbirth, Sirius wondered, and a guilt obscured any love Remus may have inherently held for her. Or some tragic, untimely accident, the grief too new to share. Perhaps she never existed at all, and Remus was delivered to Lyall by some alchemy or prayer, whole and golden as he was the day they arrived in the village. 

When they were thirteen, and Lyall was away overseeing the repainting of the schoolroom on a bright spring day, Remus and Sirius climbed up into the rafters in the cavity above Lyall's bedroom, and found - purely by chance - a carved script in the wood of the beam at the furthest end of the house; a clumsily etched _L_ and a barely decipherable _P_ , encircled by ivy and flowers chipped away in the timber, small and faded.

" _Elizabeth Proctor_ ," Remus whispered, trailing a pale finger across the lettering.

"What business would Lizzie Proctor have had up in the roof?" Sirius teased, rolling his eyes and elbowing Remus out of the way to get a better look. "She was a married lady. And a mother."

"So?"

"Mothers don't crawl around in the rafters carving their names into wood. "

"Don't they?" smiled Remus, and Sirius got the sense that he wouldn't know either way. He watched as Remus pulled his belt from out of its loops and used the prong to carve his own initials underneath the old sigil. _R.L._ , chipped away in the oak, and then: _S.B._ , and all circled around with crude ivies and threads.

"Why have you done that?" Sirius asked, grinning, something inside of him burning red as he looked at their linked marks, permanent and irremovable in the timber of the joist.

"So that the next person can find them."

"There won't be a next person," said Sirius, turning from the sigils to Remus, feeling giddy and buoyant and special. "It'll just be you and me. We'll live here together until the very house crumbles around us."

"What about my father?" Remus said through a smile that turned into a laugh that turned into a coughing fit, and Sirius slapped him on the back, still grinning.

"We'll allow him to live in the outhouse."

But they would never live in the house together. The house wouldn't let them; that darkness, that sickly, suffocating poison that seeped from the walls, would push Sirius out and away and never let him keep Remus for himself. Sirius knew it that winter, when Lyall caught him picking through the snow in the garden and shooed him away with a scowl and a wave of his calloused hand. He knew it in the dark, stormy days that followed, when Remus took to his room for a fortnight and Sirius knew it was the house's doing: keeping them apart, fracturing them. But still he came, and still he waited, on the low stone wall around the perimeter of the plot. He watched green shoots break through frozen ground, tiny sprouts straining upwards towards the light, life resurfacing after a harsh winter, and then Remus came back to him, and they came back to the woods together. _Aha!_ Sirius thought triumphantly, smirking up at the house as he slipped a hand into Remus's and allowed himself to be tugged away down the lane, away from the shadows. 

_You can't keep him either._


	2. The Bookbinder

"We'll stay here forever," murmured Remus one balmy day in May, and Sirius turned his head in the grass to look across at him. The sunlight streaming through the tree canopy above picked out the gold in his hair; a halo of gilded threads, like a tapestry, some ancient paean to a seraph or saint.

"Right here?"

"Right here," Remus smiled, his eyes closed. "We'll let the flowers grow over us and wrap us up. And when it rains the mud will swallow us whole and nobody will ever find us."

Nobody ever did find them. Sirius did his work, and cared for his mother, and then disappeared into the woods and nobody seemed to care to find out where he went all day; what he did, and why he came back with scraped knees and dandelion clocks in his long hair. If Lyall noticed Remus missing during the long summer days, nothing was ever said. And nobody in the village - not the elders, nor the schoolchildren, nor Lyall himself - ever seemed to consider that the two boys may be together, all that time. Sirius was the aloof, foolhardy boy from the old family and Remus was the pale boy with patches on his elbows and a fearsome father from the house at the end of the lane, and the one was nothing to do with the other. 

And so they had peace, for a time; Sirius etched pictures of Remus in his mind, in the trees, in the summer forever. What should have been left in their childhoods followed them through the seasons, even after their schooldays drew to a close; stories of adventurers and battles, acted out in the woods behind the house and written down in the books Remus stored beneath the floorboards under his bed. The Sirius in Remus's books was bold and free, Remus shining and fearless; twin crusaders preserved, perfectly and enduringly on the parchment. 

The months flew by in a haze of picnics and footraces, bread stolen from the schoolroom and stuffed into Remus's satchel bag, broken and shared at the rock up the hill on the eastern side of the woods. Remus picked a little bouquet of yellow flowers in the summer of their seventeenth year and gave it to Sirius: four bright sunbursts on springy stems. They were only weeds, but Sirius tucked them in his pocket when Remus wasn’t looking and brought them home and pressed them in a book about the church that he took from his father’s shelf. Remus kissed him for the first time the next day; a chaste, laughing press of warm lips in a clearing in the trees, and as Sirius pinned him to the loamy ground he felt like he might go mad if he couldn't touch every part of Remus at once. The copse of maples, thick with their green summer foliage, offered a perfect den; a sanctuary, far away from the elders and the families and the church, and they consecrated the earth there with rituals and prayers to the torn buttonholes of Sirius's undershirt, and the way Remus's cheeks dimpled when he laughed.

"Do you remember when we would play pirates in your bedroom, that one summer?" Sirius murmured against Remus's shirtsleeve, nestled against the side of him one warm morning, surrounded by daisies and weeds.

"It was springtime," Remus said, his eyes closed serenely against the light of the still-low sun pouring into their clearing.

"Fine, in the springtime," Sirius huffed, and felt Remus smile. "But you do remember the pirates?"

"Of course I remember them."

There was quiet between them for a moment, a blue jay alighting on a poplar branch overhead and singing sweetly, and then Sirius sprung up and threw himself atop Remus's chest, thighs astride and a twig for a cutlass pressed to Remus's throat.

"Deliver me your treasures!" Sirius cried, startling the blue jay from its perch and a wonderful, hooting laugh from Remus below.

"Please, Captain Black!" Remus begged as he prostrated himself on the grass, holding both hands aloft in surrender. "Have mercy!"

"Never," grinned Sirius. He tossed the cutlass aside, and bent over to plunder Remus's mouth, and the seasons slipped away, and Sirius made a promise to himself that they would always play pirates in the woods.

There was a wedding in the June of the year they both turned nineteen (there was a wedding in June most years) and the land outside the church was taken over with long wooden tables laden with chicken and mutton and vegetables from the gardens next to the meeting hall. Gabriel Griffiths married Miss Mary Allen and the elders called it a fine match, and Remus and Sirius celebrated behind the Griffiths farmhouse with a bottle of apple wine and Sirius’s britches tugged clumsily down around his thighs. 

“Will we do this at your wedding?” Remus whispered tauntingly against Sirius’s lips, tasting like home and the fruit from the orchard up on the hill.

Sirius grinned. 

“God, I hope so.”

***

A travelling market came to the village at the end of that same summer, just as the sun was beginning to lose some of its warmth and the darker nights were drawing in. Sirius took Regulus, and gave him two coins from the pocket of his overcoat to buy a small box of peppermint sticks, and spent three coins himself on a bundle of blank papers wrapped in thin vellum, which he slipped into Remus's hands behind a stall selling warm apple cider.

"Please finish the one about the pirates for me," he said, grinning, glancing over his shoulder occasionally to watch Regulus over by the schoolhouse.

"I'll have need to pry up another floorboard if I keep writing," laughed Remus.

The space below Remus's bed was almost full, Sirius had noticed, the last time he had visited the house and Remus had spent the night reading to him about their adventures on the high seas. Stuffed full of parchments and scraps from Lyall's study, anything Remus could get his hands on to keep record of their tales; the frontiersmen in the woods, the great kings and queens of Europe. The stories had slowly, over the past year, taken a more immodest turn to echo their new, ripening reality, and now necessitated a locked box with a key that Sirius had stolen under cover of darkness from the back room of the meeting hall. He delighted in hearing Remus's lilting voice describe to him the goings on in Captain Black's cabin with the insatiable deckhand Lupin, and on more than one occasion such a reading had lead to Sirius pinning Remus to the floorboards, tin box and parchments discarded, and urgently bringing him off under his nightshirt to the flicker of an oil lamp and the sound of the owls in the trees outside Remus's window.

"We are damned for this," Remus once laughed around a sinful, wanton moan, Sirius's head bobbing obscenely whilst fingers pressed between his thighs.

"Good," panted Sirius, pulling off and grinning up at him and watching him as he found his completion, spilling over Sirius's hand and his own pale stomach. 

"Truly damned," Remus murmured breathlessly, and collapsed back on the blankets, and blinked dazedly up at the ceiling as Sirius cleaned him. It was still shocking to Remus, Sirius knew, what they did together; though he'd made his own peace with it an age ago. The noises Remus made - in their bed, against Sirius's lips, into his sweat-dampened pillow - were more holy than anything Sirius's father had ever taught him or anything he'd heard from the pastor on Sundays, and God hadn't struck them down yet, if he was even watching.

"You ought not worry about that," Sirius whispered to him later, half-earnest, half-mocking. "Take your mind off the inferno. That's not where we're going."

"I feel sometimes that it is," Remus whispered back, all sincerity, and the fear in his voice made Sirius go to him and cradle his face between his hands and press adoring kisses to his forehead.

"You are too good to need to concern yourself with such things," he said softly, tracing a thumb across Remus's temple. "And if I find myself in hell-fire I shall barricade the gates shut behind me, so they couldn't drag you in even if they wanted to."

Remus grinned at that, and shook his head, and pulled Sirius down underneath the sheet to press against him in their familiar, ungodly tableau. 

"I would break down your barricade," Remus said softly, pushing a bare thigh between Sirius's, fitting so perfectly, as if it were always bound to be there. "I would burn with you."


	3. The Once-Wealthy Prospector

The first day of September the following year found Sirius kneeling on rough woollen blankets in the afternoon with Remus’s cock between his lips and Remus’s hands in his long, unruly hair. There was a tree outside the window; a maple, wide and bushy, and the sunlight refracting off its umber leaves set the room ablaze. Gabriel Griffiths had set off to the nearest town on foot two weeks ago and hadn't returned, and there was much gossip in the village; rumours of a secret woman in the towns, a torrid love affair, or a rabid gray wolf in the woods who set upon the young man and dragged him back to its den to feast upon him, boots and all.

"When you go to the towns," Remus said later, when they were wrapped together under those heavy woollen blankets and Sirius was resting his head on Remus's too-warm chest, "you must be careful of the wolves in the woods."

Sirius didn't say anything. He was watching the maples through the open window; so bright for too short a time, he considered, before the winter would come and strip their branches bare.

His engagement to Narcissa had been set the month previous, and a wedding was being planned by the village elders that Sirius would have nothing to do with until he was dragged into the church by his cousin and everything before then was inevitably destroyed by the press of her too-soft lips and the ugly flowers in her hair. They would pack soon after, his cousin and he, and Sirius would parcel away his clothes and his trinkets and the book in which he kept the pressed yellow bouquet from Remus, and they would take a cart to the towns, and Sirius would study and work and miss the village terribly. He felt, as the days passed and the meeting hall was dressed with ribbons, and Remus slept more and more, a gradual loss pulling at his insides; the plans they'd made, about the woods and the flowers and the mud swallowing them whole - although impossible and never to be realised, in any version of reality or history - began crumbling to dust, ashes in a tin box under Remus's bed. Old and unfinished stories tossed into the flames, bright and captivating for moments before burning to nothingness, cinders drifting away on a fall breeze, up, up, over the pines, away from Sirius and his empty, aching hands. He still stole away to Remus in the night, and kissed him and petted him and tried to draw tired laughter from him in the candlelight. He felt old; panning for moments of some golden youth, when days were endless and free to be spent chasing one another through the woods, Remus beaming whenever Sirius called his name. 

They found one glorious day late in the month, just before the harvest, when the sun was low and the air crisp and the apple orchard out beyond the pastures too inviting and too tempting to stay away from. Sirius packed a lunch for them and slipped away from the bustle of the church, and found Remus at the end of the lane in a heavy overcoat and a rough woollen neck scarf tugged high around his ears.

"I want to pick some apples," Remus said with a grin, slipping his hand into Sirius's as soon as they were beyond the copse of maples.

"We'll pick the orchard clean," said Sirius, leaning in to press a soft kiss to Remus's jaw, and another, nuzzling into the warm skin beneath the woollen scarf and making Remus laugh and dig an elbow into his side.

"And then you can bake pies for me," Remus went on, swinging their joined hands between them. "And I shall eat and eat until I'm so fat there will be no room in my bed for you."

Sirius shook his head, and told him they would simply have to sleep together on the bare floorboards, and they spent that wonderful morning scaling trunks and shaking branches and gathering a whole basket of shiny red apples. Remus stumbled on a root and went sprawling onto the grass, apples spilling everywhere, and Sirius howled with laughter and launched himself on top of him and found feverish hands to greet him, pulling at his coat and tugging at his hair, wrestling him down as if they were still boys in the woods, and as if Sirius weren't getting married in a week. 

"Do you remember the day by the creek," Sirius asked afterwards, when they were stretched out under one of the apple trees, Remus wrapped back up in his woollen scarf and a ruined handkerchief stowed safely in Sirius's pocket. "When you jumped in the water-"

"And it was like ice," Remus interjected softly.

"And it was like ice," smiled Sirius, turning his head to look across at Remus. "And you screamed like a girl."

Remus laughed, and closed his eyes, and Sirius watched the way the fall light found all those familiar gilt threads in his eyelashes, and he ached to reach out and touch them as he once had.

"You sure did warm me up afterwards," Remus murmured, smiling to himself. "Why are you thinking about that day?"

"I'm thinking about a lot of days," Sirius said quietly. Days in the creek, and days on the bank when Sirius swallowed Remus down and made him call out to the birds and the trees and the sky above. Days in the pasture with the horses. Days in the wretched house, in the summer with the windows thrown open, in the autumn bathed in that golden light, eclipsing the unremitting darkness. Days lost and memorialised on the pages of Remus's books. Days they could never go back to now, not in a hundred lifetimes.

They ate from the basket of apples until they could barely move and Sirius's stomach ached, and the sun sank low over the hills and the ground beneath them grew cold and hard, gravel in the earth digging into Sirius's flesh through his britches. They abandoned their unfinished bounty there under a tree, a burning-red cairn left to rot and tumble and return to the earth; something once sweet and bright bound to perish and decay, inevitable and certain. 

The house took Remus back in October, locking him away and keeping him from the mists and Sirius and the wedding party in the meeting hall. The smell of the lurid purple asters in Narcissa's hair was sweet and terrible, making Sirius's stomach roil as he careened around the hall with his new bride, under the bridges and arches formed by their families with linked hands. He climbed the tree outside Remus's window the next night, and cut his hand open on a broken branch, and Remus bathed the wound in salt water and wrapped it in a rough cloth from his bedside.

"You look a fright," Sirius said quietly, studying the dark rings around Remus's eyes in the dim, sickly light of the end of a lone tallow candle.

"Thank you," murmured Remus. He tied a knot in the cloth around Sirius's bleeding hand, then stifled a cough against his own sleeve.

They sat in silence into the night, each laboured breath from Remus and rustle from the branches outside stoking something dull and painful behind Sirius's ribs. If this was some ending, some odious last page, Sirius refused to think on it, and instead found himself curling around Remus under the blankets and pressing his face into the juncture where Remus's shoulder met his pale, clammy neck, pulse thrumming weak as a mouse under paper-thin skin.

"I don't want to leave," Sirius whispered. He fancied a lump of coal had become lodged in his throat somehow, or a veal bone, or otherwise some terrible reaction to the aster garlands still hanging like ropes from gallows around the rafters of the meeting hall.

"Neither do I."

"You're not going anywhere, Remus," he spat bitterly, and then he was shucking off his britches and Remus's nightshirt and pressing against him in the dark, the candle having burnt out entirely, thin tendrils of smoke wisping away and catching in the moonlight before disappearing into the night. They moved together by instinct, as they always had, Remus clutching at Sirius's hair and Sirius grasping at some painful wound of a memory of a decade in the woods, in the trees, in the mud and the weeds and the tall, tall grass.


	4. Remus

Half a season in the town drove Sirius to despair. Defiled streets and debased people and ceaseless, immobilising noise, and a dark house with a glum bride towards whom he felt less than nothing. Remus had insisted they mustn't write to one another, and Sirius had agreed only because he could never deny Remus anything, but it did pain him so. A single line from Remus would've brightened his days remarkably.

_"We needn't write as we speak to one another,"_ Sirius had insisted, that last night before he loaded his cases onto the cart and kissed his mother goodbye. _"Tell me of the weather, or the animals in the woods."_

_"The weather will be the same as where you are, Sirius,"_ Remus had told him, a wretchedness and a bite of cold displeasure souring his words. _"And I shall have no reason to go to the woods when you are gone."_

And so no letters came. No stories, or adventures; no great tales of intrigue from the forests or the mountains or the deck of Captain Black's brigantine. Sirius wrote, after just a handful of weeks, and inquired about the weather and the animals, but received no reply and, in Remus's silence, plunged deeper into the unbearable melancholy that had taken a hold of him that winter.

No one told Sirius when Remus passed. It didn't appear to be born of cruelty, or carelessness; rather there was simply no one to know to inform Sirius. So intimate and hidden was their union, there was no cause for anyone in the village to think of writing to him. It could wait until he came home for Regulus's birthday in the January, which he did, to find no candle in Remus’s window and a silence instead of Remus’s bright, ringing laughter, and whatever shadows had been clinging to the edges of Sirius’s mind from his years spent in the saltbox house at the end of the lane quite suddenly eclipsed everything, like a dark flash, like anti-lightning, extinguishing all in one flat, final burst: an ink pot upended onto a piece of parchment. Narcissa took his grief as a mere addendum to the complete disinterest he'd expressed towards her since before their wedding, and said nothing when he spent the first day of their visit alone in the woods. His family, in turn, were as disinterested in him as they always had been, and only Regulus cared to look concerned when Sirius returned late at night, soaked to the bone and with frost clinging to the tips of his hair.

"I do worry about you," his brother said softly as he stood with him in the hallway and helped him shuck his freezing overcoat from his shoulders, frame wracked with shivers.

"You really mustn't," Sirius replied flatly. "I am entirely unreachable."

Regulus looked at him as if he were mad, and Sirius came to think that perhaps he was. He found Remus's cross the next morning, staked into a neat row with three other headstones at the very edge of the churchyard. It was a simple thing: two planks, obscured by frost save for the name, and Sirius wouldn't remember how long he sat there on the frozen ground looking at it. Snow fell, and he dusted away the flakes in front of him so that he might keep reading, and more snow fell, and he dusted the drifts away again. There was something about the carving in the wood; primitive, crude almost, as if it might've been done with a knife, or the prong of a belt. _Remus Lupin._ Nothing more. No ivies, or flowers. No _S.B._ beneath it, and for a foolish moment Sirius thought he should add it; his own epitaph, twin engravings to match the ones Remus had carved so many years ago in the timbers of the roof above Lyall's bedroom.

_"Why have you done that?"_ Sirius could hear himself asking, giddy at the memory. 

_"So that the next person can find them,"_ Remus would reply.

"There won't be a next person," murmured Sirius to the cross. "It'll just be you and me." 

He could feel something, then; that old darkness, distant and encroaching, like poison spilling from a glass. He looked up across the churchyard wall, through the pines and down the lane to the old house, foul and looming at the edge of the woods. _Well done,_ he thought wildly, staring out through the flurries at the nine rectangular windows in the oak timber frame, and the brick chimney jutting up from the apex of the slate roof like a beacon, white with frost. _Well done._

He never went back to the Proctor House. The books would stay there, under the floorboards, until Lyall discovered them or the house burned down and Remus with it. If Sirius returned, if he read those volumes, he would be bound to finish them, eventually, and be forced to some conclusion, some terminus from which he could never return. If he never went back to them, he never would have to read the last page, and Remus would stay, somehow. They would stay together in some bright and glorious unreality, and Sirius wouldn't be there alone, in that devastating now. Perhaps someone else would find them; perhaps the next person, like Remus had said. Perhaps they'd leaf through the pages, charmed and transported and scandalised, giggling at Remus's damning turns of phrase and agile prose. Or perhaps they wouldn't. Perhaps the floorboards would never again be pried up from their fixings, and the tin box would stay locked in that dark cavity forever, and their story would never be read, or told, or known. 

It would hardly matter.

It had been perfect, and it had been small, and it had been his. 


End file.
